Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:18048 misc.legal:4623 comp.sys.ibm.pc:14828 comp.sys.mac:15354 comp.sys.apple:5686 comp.sys.atari.st:9304 comp.sys.hp:762 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,misc.legal,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: Apple Challenges HP New Wave, MS-Windows, Potentially OS/2 PM Message-ID: <1885@sugar.UUCP> Date: 24 Apr 88 19:52:41 GMT References: <5480@well.UUCP> <5492@well.UUCP> <535@nunki.usc.edu> <1120@neoucom.UUCP> Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX Lines: 47 In article <1120@neoucom.UUCP>, wtm@neoucom.UUCP writes: > screen the window happens to be; this is sort of distracting (at > least distracting to me). I'd rather just always click at the top > of the screen. Trust me, it isn't really confusing. I like the Amiga as much as the next guy, but I think putting the menus at the top of the screen like the Mac's is the biggest single design flaw in the generally pretty good Intuition interface. When you have a seperate button for the menu there's no reason to tie the menu to any particular part of the screen. It should come up directly under the mouse pointer, the way it does in most, if not all, of the UNIX based workstations. > 2. The amiga supports a concept which is apparently unique to the > Amiga. At least I personally haven't seen it elsewhere. Could > well be, though as I haven't seen every window based system in > existance. The Amiga uses a concept called screens. Screens can > be rolled up and down like the windows on a car go up and down. > Windows are rendered onto the screens... You don't mention the particular advantage to screens, which is that it provides a method of supporting multiple palletes for different programs. Each "screen" is a seperate bitmap, rendered into the CRT display by the graphics coprocessor on a scan-line by scan-line basis. This way you can have a 2 bit-plane Workbench screen and a 6 bit-plane painting screen available at once. Screens aren't quite as flexible as windows (for example, they can only be moved vertically), but they're still quite handy. The Mac uses a "pallete manager" to deal with this problem, and to allow for the use of multiple programs with different depth and palette requirements. The main problem with this is (1) It's expensive in terms of CPU power: if any window requires 8 bitplanes, all windows have to have 8 bit planes. The desktop slows down quite a bit when it has to move so many bits around. (2) Programs interfere with each other. They do a pretty good job of keeping programs out of each other's hair, but it's not really possible, particularly if you load up something like Pixel Paint. > best of the three ways. The amiga hardware is really just now > getting to the point where it is honestly capable of delivering the > performance comensurate with the needs of the O/S. Why do you say this? The Amiga windowing has always been lightning fast, compared with everyone else's, thanks to a dedicated DMA Blitter. -- -- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter -- "Have you hugged your U wolf today?" ...!bellcore!tness1!sugar!peter -- Disclaimer: These aren't mere opinions, these are *values*.